My favorite teacher was my 10th grade AP World History teacher, Mr. Prill. The genuine excitement he had for history and his enthusiasm for teaching was obvious from day 1, when he stood on his desk and shattered our young worldviews by convincing us that Europe was not, in fact, a continent. He looked like he had just played a game of full court basketball after every lecture, which was often spent with arms waving wildly, making fiery and impassioned speeches or teaching us the song he wrote to help his students learn the names and order of the Chinese dynasties.

He also shared his passion for film with us, offering extra credit assignments to write reports on famous foreign films, and he gave an entire lecture on the parallels between the history of Japanese Imperialism and the movie Mean Girls. He even structured the entire class as a TV show, referring to each unit as a Season and leaving cliffhangers at the end of his lectures. In gratitude, my class published and gifted him our own version of Mao Zedong's little red book, but this one was filled with Mr. Prill's funniest or most inspirational quotes from throughout the year.